The school blood drive was a success with 55 pints of blood donated overall by student donors, according to Jim Coventry, student council sponsor.
The event was hosted and planned by student council members and took place inside the auditorium on Sept. 24. The donations helped many hospitals around the area for patients in need of blood like accident victims, cancer patients, and surgery patients.
“This was the first time we ever filled the sign up sheet and it was filled up within two lunch periods,” Coventry said. “The sad part is that we turned people away, but the exciting part was the sheet was full.”
With this big success for the first time as far as Coventry can remember, there’s no doubt that a second blood drive will be planned sometime early next year.
“This January we are planning to do another one,” Audrey Dennis, senior, said.
Jorgen Nelson, senior, has donated blood and encourages those who were thinking of doing the blood drive but are on the fence because of fears of needles or blood.
“If you have a friend, see if you can sign up at the same time as them and then you guys can kinda make eye contact and distract each other,” Nelson said. “Another is you can just try not to think about it too much until like right before it happens because you start overthinking it.”
She feels it’s best to think about the people that will benefit and the causes that will be supported by surpassing fears by giving blood to the next blood drive.
According to givingblood.org, “Only 37 percent of our country’s population is eligible to give blood, and less than 10 percent of those who can donate actually do donate annually.”
Donations are necessary because one in seven people who enter the hospital need blood and blood is needed every two seconds according to givingblood.org. To put that into perspective, around 121,915,000 people in America are able to donate blood but around 12,191,500 donate to blood drives per year.
One person can donate close to one pint of blood per visit which averages 12,191,500 pints of blood out of what could be an average 121,915,000 pints of blood per year. The final number could even increase if those eligible donated more than once per year.
The average amount Americans donate per year doesn’t add up to the number of hospital patients that need blood.
This problem can be fixed by spreading awareness of the importance of giving blood, and most importantly, signing up and donating when the sign up sheets are available later in the school year.